Category: News Feeds

The Biglaw trend of generously expanding parental leave, and ensuring it is gender neutral, is continuing. Munger, Tolles & Olson recently announced an expanded leave program, effective August 1, for all attorneys.

The new benefit provides parents with 18 weeks of paid parental leave. That leave make be taken consecutively or they can split it up into two chunks of time, allowing them to take some time at the arrival of the child and then later, perhaps when their partner’s parental leave ends. Birthing mothers may also take six to eight weeks of paid disability leave, meaning, at the high end, a new parent can have up to 26 weeks of paid leave.

The expanded leave program is Munger Tolles’s latest effort to create a truly family-friendly firm. They offer on-site, subsidized childcare — and have since 2010. Additionally, the firm provides subsidized back-up childcare, up to 20 days per year for each child.

While the expanded benefits for new parents are certainly nice, there’s been a lot of talk recently about whether it’s smart for your career to use the benefits. The good news is that associates don’t have to wonder if taking leave will permanently damage their career prospects, because Munger Tolles has plenty of positive examples in their partnership. Indeed, this year’s partnership class includes three attorneys — Rose Leda Ehler, Laura K. Lin, and Kuruvilla J. Olasa — who took leave in the year leading up to making partner.

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Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, and host of The Jabot podcast. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter (@Kathryn1).

Under the figurative cloak of darkness, at 6:30 p.m. (EDT) summer Friday, the Supreme Court decided that the rule of law no longer applies to Republican presidents.

That’s not how the Supreme Court’s ruling in Trump v. Sierra Club is being reported. And that is by design. As with every Court decision, the legalese of the opinion flummoxes most mainstream, non-legal media. Meanwhile, the legal press is so committed to pretending that Supreme Court justices are something more than naked partisan hacks that we drown in the minutia while trying to make ourselves sound smart because we understand “standing.”

As with Trump v. Hawaii (the Muslim Ban), the guiding legal principle here is “Trump must win.” Trump v. Sierra Club is dressed up to look like a “legal” opinion, but it is an entirely political one. A dog is a dog even if it is wearing a dress.

For those interested in getting the legal wedge in the trivial pursuit of “Arguments To Justify Tyranny,” the Court ruled that an injunction against the Trump administration stealing $2.5 billion of Pentagon funds to begin construction on the border wall should be lifted, because the plaintiffs (which included environmental groups like the Sierra Club), likely did not have standing to challenge the thievery of the funds. This is a bad argument for two reasons:

• If environmental groups don’t have standing to challenge the environmental harm caused by the misappropriation of military funds to ruin the environment, who the hell does?
• Saying that Trump can steal the funds while we wait to figure out who has the right to challenge his theft is like saying you can steal a car from a parking lot until the police can figure out who the rightful owner was. The Supreme Court just authorized Trump to take a joy ride with public tax dollars.

I don’t want to spend too much time dissecting the Court’s bad faith logic here, because it is illogical and offered in bad faith. The Supreme Court has decided that Trump can build his wall. How they legally got to “yes” on that question is irrelevant. Some who are willing to play the Court’s game and parse its language see “hope” for a future democratically elected president should he or she want to misappropriate Pentagon funding to combat climate change, over the expressed will of Congress. I think these people are missing the core concept of what is going on here. The five conservatives on the Supreme Court do not care about “precedent,” and they don’t care about intellectual consistency. Chief Justice John Roberts will grant standing to freaking Nemo if he doesn’t like how a Democrat violates the separation of powers.

Laws are of no more use here. Our government no longer operates under the “rule of law” in any meaningful way; it’s only about raw political power now. The Republicans will do whatever they can get away with. At least four Supreme Court justices will go along with those efforts, no matter what. The fifth, John Roberts, thinks his job is to bend the law to the Republican will as much as he can without “breaking it,” with the understanding that he believes himself to be the final arbiter on when things are broken.

Does Trump have the raw political power to build his wall? If the “resistance” keeps waiting for the courts to save us, he sure does.

If not, well, massive construction projects don’t go very well when a fierce majority of people are willing to oppose it. Every wall in history has, ultimately, been breached. The question is merely one of dedication.

The pen is mightier than the sword. But I promise you a sledgehammer is more powerful than the Supreme Court’s rubber stamp.

Here’s Some Bullshit [SupremeCourt.gov]

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Elie Mystal is the Executive Editor of Above the Law and a contributor at The Nation. He can be reached @ElieNYC on Twitter, or at elie@abovethelaw.com. He will resist.

Happy Monday, unless you work at Apollo Global.

In that case, you’re probably still grimacing from that time last Friday when you learned that your boss had broken his silence on the revelations of his decades-long private business relationship with convicted sex offender and alleged sex trafficker/financier Jeffrey Epstein. And you’re probably still grimacing because his statement via memo to you –entitled “Recent Press Coverage”– was…[tugs on collar and moans softly.]

Per Bloomberg:

The New York-based firm conducted an internal review into its involvement with Epstein, a registered sex offender since 2009, to ensure that any ties go no further than the firm’s co-founder, people with knowledge of the matter said. They looked at emails and records to determine there was no connection between the company and Epstein, one of the people said.

Black said in a memo sent to employees that “Apollo has never done any business with Mr. Epstein at any point in time.”

Epstein has “provided professional services to my family partnership and related family entities, involving tax, estate planning and philanthropic advice,” Black said in the memo. He added: “I was completely unaware of, and am deeply troubled by, the conduct that is now the subject of the federal criminal charges brought against him.”

 See? All better!

Well, there is one thing:

Over the years, the associations between Black and Epstein deepened. Epstein was a director of the Leon Black Family Foundation from at least 2001, according to disclosure forms filed with the U.S. government. His name appeared on these forms until 2012. That was an administrative error, according to a statement from a spokeswoman for Black. Epstein was asked to resign in 2007, but records weren’t kept up to date, she said.

“On a few occasions, I donated money to certain charitable organizations with which Mr. Epstein was affiliated and he made contributions to certain charitable organizations that are meaningful to me,” Black said in the memo.

Covington Catholic student Nick Sandmann went viral as the MAGA hat-wearing kid who smirked in the face of a Native-American activist. Sandmann claims he and his friends were the ones being harassed — allegedly by a group of Black Israelites. People have argued that this is why it was “more complex” that some students were heard hurling invective at a Native-American guy while Sandmann stood there, which doesn’t exactly follow but here we are.

Sandmann filed a massive defamation lawsuit against the Washington Post over its reporting on the incident. Conservative social media gleefully proclaimed that the $250 million lawsuit would destroy the Washington Post, the only major national newspaper with lingering credibility in a world where Maggie Haberman continues to masquerade as a journalist for the New York Times. As it turned out, the Sandmann case just got booted to the curb exactly as every actual lawyer expected.

Whether Sandmann took part in the uglier aspects of the fracas or not — or whether or not merely wearing a hat largely accepted as communicating animosity toward minorities was enough to make Sandmann more than a passive bystander in the affair — weren’t issues the court even needed to touch. In the end, Judge Bertelsman actually read the Washington Post articles and decided that hurting a snowflake’s feelings didn’t amount to defamation in Kentucky… or anywhere actually:

The Court accepts Sandmann’s statement that, when he was standing motionless in the confrontation with Phillips, his intent was to calm the situation and not to impede or block anyone.

However, Phillips did not see it that way. He concluded that he was being “blocked” and not allowed to “retreat.” He passed these conclusions on to The Post. They may have been erroneous, but, as discussed above, they are opinion protected by the First Amendment. And The Post is not liable for publishing these opinions, for the reasons discussed in this Opinion.

And that is the only specific claim that Sandmann identified as defamatory. The rest of the complaint relied heavily on the phrase “false and defamatory gist,” and for those of you taking the bar exam, causes of actions are rarely pleaded with particularity when the complaint repeatedly uses the word “gist.”

This is a huge blow to the psyche of right-wing social media which at this point is just Wall memes, Sandmann’s cause, and QAnon theories all cobbled together with scotch tape and dementia. But lawyers should know better. Even the right-wing commentators at Legal Insurrection called the suit out as silly from jump. But over at The Federalist, they’re still spinning nonsense about the strength of the complaint and holding out hope that the Sixth Circuit will swoop in and smash the Washington Post. Hey, any court that has judges like John Bush who can boast “anti-gay blogger” as his primary qualification for the job always has a decent chance of taking a radical departure from the law, but barring a panel of judges looking to waste judicial resources for the sake of rallying the base, this shambles of a case should be finally put out of its misery.

(Opinion available on the next page.)

Infamous Covington High School Student Lawyers Up, Gets Ready To Pursue Defamation Claims

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Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.

For AI-powered legal research startup ROSS Intelligence, it was both a blessing and a curse.

Five years ago, when it launched as a prototype developed at the University of Toronto, AI in law was still a somewhat novel concept, generating clickbait headlines about robots doing the work of lawyers.

News stories about ROSS struck a common chord, describing it as a robotic junior associate, a robotic legal researcher, and a legal research robo-lawyer.

Such headlines helped bring media attention and investor interest. In short order, ROSS’s founders had left Toronto for Silicon Valley, where they participated in the prestigious Y-Combinator startup incubator, drew an investment from Dentons’s NextLaw Labs, and secured first $4.3 million in seed funding and then another $8.7 million in Series A funding. In 2017, Forbes named ROSS’s three founders to its “30 Under 30.”

But all that attention also brought pressures and challenges. The three founders ranged in age from 21 to 25. They were inexperienced in business and in building a company. AI in legal research was a nascent field with no models for them to start from.

It was a stressful time, cofounder and CEO Andrew Arruda told me. Although they had a vision of using AI to make legal research more affordable, they had no experience in being entrepreneurs or scaling a product.

“It was a huge challenge for us to build it from scratch,” Arruda said. “We were experimenting and innovating under the spotlights, because we had a lot of media attention.”

One consequence of that was that ROSS became secretive about showing its product. For years, the company rebuffed my requests to review it. Others told me similar stories, including law librarians and knowledge managers. Someone must have been seeing it, because the company was reporting sales, but they were strangers to me.

The reason for this secrecy, Arruda now tells me, was that they truly thought they were building something unique, and they feared that a competitor would steal it out from under them. They kept the product close to the vest, until they reached the point where they were confident that it was ready.

That point has arrived.

In June, quietly and without fanfare, ROSS changed its website to offer free trials of its product to anyone who wants one. The product that had once seemed a state secret was now open to everyone for a two-week free trial, not even a credit card required.

Then last week, at Arruda’s invitation, I spent two days at ROSS’s research and development offices in Toronto. I had unfettered access to its entire engineering and design teams. I sat in on engineering and UX team meetings. I was encouraged to ask any question I wanted of anyone I wanted.

(Earlier today, I published an in-depth report on my visit to ROSS and what I learned about the company. You can find that at my LawSites blog: At AI Research Company ROSS, A New Stage of Transparency and Engagement.)

This new transparency is the culmination of a year of refocusing and refinement for ROSS. It has been a year of major developments for the company, including not just refinement of its product, but also a refocusing of its marketing towards smaller firms, a reconfiguration of its pricing to a monthly no-obligation subscription, and the hiring of a veteran head of engineering, Stergios Anastasiadis, formerly of Shopify and Google, to lead future development.

In the five years since it started, the glare of the media spotlight has somewhat dimmed for ROSS. The clickbait headlines have largely subsided. Meanwhile, its founders have matured, the company has matured and, it appears, its product has matured.

But the legal research market is even more competitive today than it was when ROSS started. Both long-established players and up-and-coming startups are using AI and claiming, as does ROSS, that they deliver better, more-precise results.

The proof, as they say, is in the pudding. ROSS is making a smart move in opening its product for anyone to try. By lifting the secrecy around its product, ROSS is declaring its confidence in it. Now it is for the market to judge.

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Robert Ambrogi is a Massachusetts lawyer and journalist who has been covering legal technology and the web for more than 20 years, primarily through his blog LawSites.com. Former editor-in-chief of several legal newspapers, he is a fellow of the College of Law Practice Management and an inaugural Fastcase 50 honoree. He can be reached by email at ambrogi@gmail.com, and you can follow him on Twitter (@BobAmbrogi).

I’ve always said I’ll stay on this job as long as I can do it full steam. At my age — 86 — you have to take it year by year. I was okay this last term and I expect to be okay next term. And then after that, we’ll have to see.

— Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, in comments made about her health and any possible retirement plans she may have, during Duke Law’s “Conversation with Ruth Bader Ginsburg,” an event associated with the school’s D.C. Summer Institute on Law and Policy, which is now in its seventh year.

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Staci Zaretsky is a senior editor at Above the Law, where she’s worked since 2011. She’d love to hear from you, so please feel free to email her with any tips, questions, comments, or critiques. You can follow her on Twitter or connect with her on LinkedIn.

The landscape of legal education is rapidly changing, and admissions exams aren’t what they used to be. Not only has the LSAT, the traditional law school entrance exam, moved to an entirely digital format, but more and more law schools are making the decision to accept another standardized test, the GRE, in lieu of the LSAT.

You can now count Southern Methodist University Dedman School of Law among the ever-growing list of law schools getting on board with the trend and accepting the GRE for admissions. In addition to being lower-cost and offered much more frequently than the LSAT, the move has been pitched by many in legal academia as drawing applicants with a diverse academic background. As noted by Dean Jennifer Collins:

“For nearly 100 years, SMU Dedman School of Law has always looked at the prospective student as a whole person,” said Jennifer Collins, Dean of SMU Dedman School of Law. “Adding the GRE as a standardized test option will help us identify an even broader pool of applicants who will flourish in law school and who will make meaningful contributions to our profession and our community.”

For those keeping track at home, the law schools that are currently accepting the GRE are: Harvard, Yale, Columbia, St. John’s, Brooklyn, Northwestern, Arizona, Georgetown, Hawaii, Washington University in St. Louis, Wake Forest, Cardozo School of Law, Texas A&M, BYU, John Marshall Law School, Florida State, Pace, UCLA, Chicago-Kent College of Law, Penn, USC, Cornell, Buffalo, NYU, Florida International University College of Law, and Penn State Law at University Park. (University of Chicago and University of Georgia both allow candidates in dual degree programs to skip the LSAT.) And we are likely to only see this trend continue. According to a survey by Kaplan Test Prep, a full 25 percent of law schools have plans to accept the GRE.

Even though the GRE is gaining popularity in law school admissions, don’t expect an official statement from the American Bar Association — the body responsible for law school accreditation anytime soon. The accreditation body’s lack of an official response has functionally ceded the question to law schools. ABA accreditation Standard 503 currently mandates that law schools require admissions testing, and that the test used be “valid and reliable,” but what that means for the GRE isn’t clear. (Though a number of law schools and ETS, the maker of the GRE, have done their own validity testing.) The ABA considered a resolution that would elimination the testing requirement in admission, however, in August of last year, the ABA Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar officially withdrew that resolution before the ABA House of Delegates. Since then, it’s been radio silence from the ABA.

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Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, and host of The Jabot podcast. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter (@Kathryn1).

Make no mistake, a mouthy defendant determined to keep objecting throughout a hearing can be a headache for everyone else involved. A judge trying to manage the orderly flow of justice has to find a way to balance the constitutional rights of an agitated defendant fighting for their future with the need for decorum. There are many tools in a judge’s arsenal to keep things running smoothly. Robbing the defendant of basic human dignity is… not the best one.

This story comes from Louisiana, where defendant Michael Duhon kept making objections during his own sentencing:

According to court minutes, Duhon objected when the judge asked him to stop submitting motions on his own behalf in the case instead of through his attorney. He objected again when evidence was submitted. He attempted to offer arguments against the inclusion of the evidence and was told to speak through his attorney.

Without passing judgment on the quality of the evidentiary arguments he was trying to make, at least he’s trying to make a point. This isn’t a guy just yelling “LIAR!” at witnesses and creating a scene — he’s actually trying to press his case, however bad he may be at it.

Judge Marilyn Castle could have responded to these outbursts any number of responsible, judicious ways, but instead decided to have her bailiff do this:

After requesting at least twice for Duhon to remain quiet, Castle ordered the bailiff to tape Duhon’s mouth shut during witness testimony.

Thankfully, Duhon’s public defender was there to object and suggest that, you know, Duhon be removed from the courtroom for his lack of decorum instead of treated like an extra at Abu Ghraib.

Rather than own up to her own judicial temperament failures, Judge Castle has since launched an effort to punish literally anyone else who might have caught her debasing her office:

Public defender Michael Gregory, who does not represent Duhon but was present in court at the time of the incident, is facing potential contempt charges for filming the encounter on his cell phone, according to court minutes.

…

Minutes also show “the Court further ordered that all filming dissemination from this court proceeding must be retrieved/destroyed….”

A stellar example to set for criminal defendants — if you commit a transgression, the most important thing is to eliminate all the evidence and drop the hammer on the witnesses. Castle fined Gregory $100 and banned him from using a cellphone in the courthouse for six months. After all, he can’t be trusted to not catch her in some other embarrassing situation.

As you might imagine, Gregory is going to appeal.

Lafayette judge orders man’s mouth duct-taped during sentencing hearing [Acadiana Advocate]
Lawyer Gets in Trouble Over Duct-Tape Incident [Newser]

The world keeps getting more and more interconnected, and law firms that are able to smoothly navigate international waters across dozens of practice areas are extremely valuable. Cross-border legal work is complex, and the firms that do it well deserve recognition as the global powerhouses that they are.

Law360 (sub. req.) has announced the latest edition of their list of the top 20 global law firms. Their methodology, described below, attempts to find the firms that are truly able to compete in the international legal market:

Firms are ranked based on five factors: the percentage of the firm’s attorneys located outside its home country; the number of offices outside the firm’s home country; the number of countries where the firm has at least one office; the practice area breadth of the firm’s cross-border and international work; and the size and complexity of the firm’s cross-border and international work.

Here are the top 5 firms of the 2019 Global 20:

1. Baker McKenzie
1. White & Case
3. Allen & Overy
4. Norton Rose Fulbright
5. DLA Piper

Click here to see the next 15 firms on the list.

White & Case once again snags the top spot on the list, but this time shares its glory with Baker McKenzie, a firm that was ranked at #12 on last year’s Global 20. That’s quite the leap in just one year’s time, so way to go!

Money makes the world go round, and these firms are definitely keeping it spinning. Digging further into the data reveals that these 20 firms combined have offices in 276 cities in more than 100 countries on six continents and every single one has an office in New York, London, Paris, Hong Kong, and Beijing.

Congratulations to all the firms on the list!

Law360 Reveals The Global 20 Firms Of 2019 [Law360 (sub. req.)]

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Staci Zaretsky is a senior editor at Above the Law, where she’s worked since 2011. She’d love to hear from you, so please feel free to email her with any tips, questions, comments, or critiques. You can follow her on Twitter or connect with her on LinkedIn.

Coming out of law school, most people’s credentials are the same:  “I went to X Law School.  My grades were Y.”  You get hired (or not) based on those credentials.  Employers are hiring you for what you may become, not what you are.

After five years, things have changed.  Your law school grades probably don’t matter quite as much.  But your experience becomes far more important:  “I’m a litigator.”  “I’m an employment litigator.”  “I’m a tax adviser.”  “I give SEC advice.”  “I advise investment funds.”   You’re no longer a blank slate — a young lawyer who can be molded into any form. 

As time passes, your grades almost certainly matter less and experience molds you further still.  After 10 or 20 years of repeatedly doing the same thing, you can no longer plausibly claim to be something other than what you are. 

Perhaps you’re now a specialist.

Or perhaps not.  After 10 or 20 years of doing a variety of different things, you can no longer claim to be a specialist in some particular field.  You’ve become a generalist, and the only people who will retain (or employ) you are those seeking out generalist advice.  You no longer run with the specialists.

The same truth holds true for everyone: You enter the workforce with your credentials; you exit with your experience.

Think about this as you make choices.

I’ve heard a person say (quite reasonably), “Thanks for thinking of me for an in-house job as an employment lawyer.  But I’m now working at a firm, and I have my own client base.  If I work for your corporation, I’ll have to give up my client base.  And then, if your corporation fires me, I’ll have nowhere to go.  I won’t run that risk.”

That’s an entirely reasonable person.

But I’ve also heard people say (quite reasonably), “Why would we hire an employment lawyer who’s worked only at a law firm for 20 years when there are other candidates who have in-house experience?  We need someone who understands how corporate structures work and who knows the type of advice that in-house lawyers are regularly called upon to give.  We don’t want someone from a firm; we want someone with in-house experience.”

You have to pick your poison; you can’t be both candidates.

Coming out of law school, many students talk about “keeping their options open.”  But options exist only to be exercised.  Inertia or indecision can cause someone to take the path of least resistance, or the path of maximum prestige, or the path of greatest riches.  But no matter how you select it, you’ve chosen a path, and that route will dictate where you go.

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Mark Herrmann spent 17 years as a partner at a leading international law firm and is now deputy general counsel at a large international company. He is the author of The Curmudgeon’s Guide to Practicing Law and Inside Straight: Advice About Lawyering, In-House And Out, That Only The Internet Could Provide (affiliate links). You can reach him by email at inhouse@abovethelaw.com.